Dark Souls II is a punishing game, and everybody knows it. It's so punishing that the player's maximum HP reduces with each death, bottoming out at 50 percent of your total health when hollow (sort of undead). Thankfully, finding and equipping the Ring of Binding limits this brutal reduction...
More

Ever since I spotted Varric in the first Dragon Age: Inquisition trailer , I’ve been excited for his return to Thedas. His jokes, tall tales, and loyalty made him my favorite party member in Dragon Age II. Sure, the rogue might be prone to embellishing the truth, but you know that he has your back...
More

These days I'm pleasantly surprised by the steady Tales releases in North America. For a period during the PS2 and PS3 era, I questioned how Bandai Namco felt about the series' potential in the U.S. market. We saw poor localization decisions, like bringing over Tales of Legendia as opposed to...
More

Tedium is inherently subjective. Some folks like turning over every last stone on the hunt for that last powerful item. Others like grinding for hours in RPGs to maximize their entire party’s potential. However, it’s safe to assume that the broad majority of gamers are interested in having...
More

When people think of games that require strategy and a time investment of more than 400 hours of play time, titles like World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and Guild Wars II come to mind. What many gamers don’t realize is that the battle-filled world of Pokémon requires intense hours of training...
More

The Xbox 360 adaptation of one of the greatest PC games of 2011 finally came out, and we talked to the developers at CDProjekt RED to get their thoughts on bringing their dark, violent fantasy over to console. Catch up on your Witcher 2 needs with everything you need to know about the game and/or my...
More

Some RPGs expect players to nurture long courtships and build relationships with love interests before getting any romantic payoff. That's not the case with Skyrim. This simple guide shows you how to tie the knot with your favorite eligible citizen. The first step is going to the Temple of Mara in...
More

As a longtime fan of role-playing games, most of my decisions regarding new console purchases were decided by which system had the best RPGs. Though I loved my SNES, I didn’t think twice about abandoning Nintendo and buying a PlayStation instead of an N64. In retrospect, I absolutely made the right...
More

The ensemble cast is part of what makes role-playing games great. How the characters interact with each other and work together in combat helps give each RPG its own identity. But what if you didn’t need to worry about that? What if you could just cherry-pick your dream party from the entire catalog...
More

In game development, the visual improvements, non-player character AI tweaks, and new storytelling philosophies are all for naught if the base activity the player performs the most frequently is uninteresting or unrefined. In the case of an action role-playing game like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, those...
More